Like a jazzy riff on old standards by William S. Burroughs and Nelson Algren comes Charles Tidler’s debut novel, Going to New Orleans. Tidler, who makes his home in Victoria, is best known as a playwright, but he is also a poet and a spoken-word jazz artist. His talent for oral performance is on full display here.

Throughout the novel, Tidler makes liberal use of alliteration, interior rhyme, and complex sentence construction to produce rhythms that are compelling and addictive. Portions of the book almost demand to be read and reread aloud in order to savour the swish and clatter of the prose. There’s a swing to these sentences.

Going to New Orleans follows dipsomaniacal jazz trumpeter Lewis King and his girlfriend, Ms Sugarlicq, from Victoria to the humid underbelly of New Orleans. The adventures in this picaresque novel range from sickening to bizarre to surreal. Much of the action takes place in a drunken haze where the line between reality and fantasy is blurred. Both King and Sugarlicq are violent, uncontrollably libidinous, and possibly insane, making New Orleans the perfect environment in which to set them roaming. No other place is as steeped in the mythology of death, sex, alcohol, and jazz. No other place could have an underbelly quite this low.

The literary roots of this novel are on plain display, as Tidler variously evokes Mark Twain, William Faulker, Walker Percy, John Kennedy Toole, and, of course, Burroughs and Algren. One virtuoso chapter, slyly titled “River Run,” is a Joycean fantasy of New Orleans as seen from a bicycle ride alongside the Mississippi. It is on this level of cerebral and artistic exercise that the novel is a great success, rather than on the basis of story or character.

Tidler knows his characters are beyond redemption. The novel makes no effort to redeem them, but neither does it fully explore them. For long stretches, no one seems to experience or communicate anything resembling human emotion, and we quickly lose our traction with the characters, mired as they are in their repeated disasters. There is no growth here, just a long unravelling of morality and sanity, set to a swinging beat.